We loved it and always broke into joyous laughter. My grandfather would hear us, and he’d yell, “What’s with the laughter down there? The Jews are still in Egypt, what’s so funny?”
Uncle Lee also told me a family legend about Grandpa Abraham’s uncle Louie Kaminsky from Minsk. I don’t know whether it was fact or fiction, but it was pretty funny. It seems that Uncle Louie was some kind of a religious zealot. On Saturdays, he would take stones and bricks and hurl them through the air and break every window of every store that was open on Saturday in Minsk. He was always arrested and spent the night in jail.
“Louie,” the policemen said, “these stores are not owned by Jews. They’re allowed to be open on Saturday.”
And Louie countered with, “That doesn’t matter. It’s Saturday, and on Saturday nothing should be open!”
Me at age eight （center） with my cousin Merril （left） and my brothers, Bernie, twelve （right）， Lenny, sixteen （top left）， and Irving, eighteen （top right）， on the street in front of my grandpa’s house in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn.
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Even though he knew for the rest of his life he would spend every Saturday night in jail, he still threw the bricks. I’ve broken a few windows in my life but never on purpose, and I think looking back that there is still a lot of crazy Uncle Louie in me. For instance…
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Normally at the end of my stand-up performances, I would open the show up for questions from the audience. Sometimes when my response to a question got an enormous laugh I would save that question. One of the questions I saved was: “Mr. Brooks, were you ever arrested?”
My immediate answer was “No!” And then I thought…wait a minute.
“Let me amend that. Was I ever arrested? Well…nearly.”
Here is where the touch of Crazy Uncle Louie in me comes out.
Sometimes on a Sunday afternoon, a couple of us kids would frequent the local Woolworth, which we knew as the five-and-ten because a lot of the items were actually sold for five or ten cents—Hershey bars, little pen-sized flashlights, whistles, yo-yos, etc. We’d often walk up and down the aisles and when the clerks weren’t looking we’d try to snatch something. We never called it stealing; we used to call it “taking.”
“Let’s go taking!”
Normally, when no one was looking I could always get a yo-yo or a whistle and slip it into my jacket with no problems. But one Sunday afternoon I tempted fate. There, in a special display of Roy Rogers hats and T-shirts, was a pearl-handled toy replica of a Roy Rogers six-shooter. It was the most thrilling thing I’d ever seen. But how to slip it into my coat? It wasn’t a whistle or a yo-yo, not easy. When the clerk at the display turned his head to attend to a customer, I took off my sweater, dropped it on the pistol, and picked it up. I was nearly out the door when hands grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and pulled me back in the store.
A great big man announced, “I’m the manager and I’m sick and tired of you kids stealing!”
And I knew, this was one guy I couldn’t con by saying, “just taking.”
As the manager marched me up the aisle he said, “I’m gonna call the police and have you arrested! And then I’m gonna call your parents and let them know everything!”
“Please!” I tearfully shouted. “I don’t have parents! I just have a mother! My father is dead! Please, give me a break.”
The budding actor in me tried his best, but to no avail. The unrelenting manager kept steadfastly marching me toward his office. In a blinding flash an idea popped into my head. I reached into my sweater, pulled out the toy gun, and shouted, “Get back or I’ll blow your head off!”
For a moment, it worked. He saw the gun and jumped back. I ran with all my might and got out of the store. I never went back there again, and hoped that he wouldn’t remember my face. Chances are he didn’t live in our neighborhood but came from Queens or somewhere to work at the store.
I realized then that I could never be half as good as Arsène Lupin, the famous fictional French jewel thief. So right then and there I decided to give up “taking,” for good.
When we weren’t “taking,” my friends and I loved to play stickball. I was a skinny, stringy little kid with endless energy, and I was always running. One day we were playing stickball and I was up at bat. There was a ’36 Chevy parked on our street and I took off my brand-new camel’s hair Passover holiday sweater, folded it very carefully, and tucked it in that nice niche in the front of the fender right underneath one of the headlights. Then I got a scratch single and a bad throw sent me to second. Suddenly I see this beautiful black ’36 Chevy pull away from the curb and take off with my sweater. Whoosh! I went after it. “He’s out!” they were yelling. “He’s out! He left the base!”